Gloucester City Homes has evicted one in eight of its tenants claiming Universal Credit - the new benefit which is leaving many claimants without money for weeks on end.

The social housing landlord has confirmed it has removed eight of its current 66 Universal Credit claimants between June 2015 and September 2017.

When Universal Credit was introduced to Gloucester in June 2015, the average level of arrears for the eight evicted Universal Credit claimants was £770 - an average of two-and-a-half months of rent arrears.

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Prime Minister Theresa May said her government will "continue to look at how we are dealing with this" and said more people are getting into work on universal credit than were doing so on Jobseekers' allowance.

Gloucester City Homes said Mr Corbyn's statement was inaccurate. A spokesman said: "This statement is not factually accurate and the reference implies that we are evicting one in eight of all GCH’s tenants.

"The evictions quoted by Mr Corbyn relates to eight of the current 66 Universal Credit claimants at September 2017, compared to GCH’s overall eviction rate of one tenant for the remaining 4,442 tenanted homes."

What's happened to the evicted tenants?

Gloucester City Homes has said it doesn't know what has happened to the eight evicted tenants but they have been referred to Gloucester City Council to review their housing situations.

The landlord said 85 per cent of its universal credit claimants were already in rent arrears before going on to the new system, compared with 20 per cent of all its other tenants.

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During 2016-17, Gloucester Law Centre secured over £700,000 of benefits for Gloucester City Homes tenants. During the same period, Gloucester City Homes made 343 direct referrals to the CAB for debt advice.

Ashley Green, chief executive of Gloucester City Homes.

At the end of March 2017, Gloucester City Homes collected 99.95 per cent of the rent it was owed.

A spokesman said: "Gloucester City Homes does not take the decision to evict its tenants lightly and in all of the eight cases who were on Universal Credit, we followed a significant safeguarding process which consists of at least 11 stages and we have to abide with a pre-action protocol designed to avoid legal action and sustain tenants in their homes.

"Our support mechanisms include providing funding support for both Gloucester Law Centre and the Citizens Advice Bureau to provide direct and speedy access to welfare benefits advice for our tenants. We also sign post tenants to the Gloucester Credit Union for short term loans and access to credit."